Even MORE Spaghetti Monsters!

01.29.09

If you don’t check out Andrew Sullivan’s blog, you should. He doesn’t allow comments but he does accept emails that he sometimes then posts in response. The “thread” then for his original Flying Spaghetti Monster has gotten increasing longer and longer and I keep retorting here on my own blog. Sullivan gets tens of thousands of emails a day so I’d rather just continue the convo here. To catch up, check my original post.

“What the defenders of the Flying Spaghetti Monster thesis’ commensurability with actual theism fail to recognize is that belief in God generally doesn’t have anything so “concrete” as its substance. It’s not the particulars of God — the “invisible man in the sky” imagery and such — that matter.”

The focus on the actual doctrine of the Flying Spaghetti Monster is pointless. FSM is a spoof, a hoax, a satirical look at religion at face value. If you boil down the specifics of the major faiths objectively, they have some very hard-to-swallow aspects that you might not buy were they not part of an established religion: virgin birth, disappearing golden tablets, resurrection, space aliens. FSM doesn’t pretend to be a meaningful faith so to argue with that in mind gets us nowhere.

Again, I’ll go back to my original statement: replace FSM with Scientology or Mormonism and maybe we’ll have some interesting converstation; albeit, one with actual repercussions – I doubt maybe FSM “followers” really care if someone calls their faith absurd.

“One last way to express this idea, calling on anthropology to aid philosophy: if belief in God is merely a testament to humanity’s desire to believe, would belief in a flying spaghetti monster have arisen in history for the same reason?”

Again, pointless argument as is. Insert “would belief in an intergalactic alien lord Xenu” have arisen in history for the same reason?” and all of a sudden, it’s not so simple, is it? That faith has arisen. Scientology is an established and recognized religion that has grown exponentially in the past 50+ years. It’s not a spoof, it’s not a satire.

Finally:

“[T]he evidence for God that your last commentator finds lacking is the same kind of evidence which can’t be found to support the existence of morality. Does he really believe that morality doesn’t exist, that moral propositions have no objective truth value?”

I find it troublesome that a philosophy major would seem to argue that morality and religion are intricately linked. You don’t need to go too much farther than Kant to find arguments for morality without religion. One can have a moral code without subscribing to any particular faith.